MediaWiki 1.24 is the current stable MediaWiki version. Consult the RELEASE-NOTES file for the full list of changes. It was deployed on the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis through incremental "wmf"-branches from April 2014 to September 2014. The 1.24.0 stable release was published on Wednesday, November 26th 2014. Download the latest snapshot or checkout the REL1_24 branch in Git to follow this release.

MediaWiki is known to be extremely flexible and customisable, but few users use its full potential. In 1.24, we aim to make dozens of obscure options preferences easily discoverable and obvious to use.

Improvements have been made to the password storage system in gerrit:77645, allowing improved security against offline attacks should a wiki's database be compromised by attackers. Then, in gerrit:149658, the default password storage algorithm was changed to PBKDF2.

PBKDF2 and Bcrypt have built-in support in PHP. The new extensible password API makes it trivial to implement scrypt support if we wanted to.

During the development cycle for 1.24, MediaWiki development had a focus on frontend performance.

(bug 39035) Vector skin performance was improved by removing collapsibleNav, which was used to collapse some sidebar elements by default. This removes -list suffixes like p-lang-list: which means that instead of using things like #p-lang-list, you need to use #p-lang .body ul.

{{!}} is now a magic word that results in |, mainly for use in templates and other complex templates. If your wiki has a template at Template:!, you will need to change the name and update any usage of it. If your Template:! is just |, it can be safely deleted.

Removed the hook SpecialSearchGo. Any extensions depending on this hook will break.

Starting with MediaWiki 1.24, we're cleaning up the API, and working towards an API 2.0. See the roadmap for more details.

Rarely used data formats deprecated: dbg, dump, txt, wddx, yaml. These may be removed in a future release.

Token handling overhauled: the action=query module is now deprecated and replaced by action=query&meta=tokens. Most actions now just take a generic "csrf" token, and the token type is now properly documented in the auto-generated documentation.

The legacy skins/common/ directory has been emptied and deleted as part of the skin system cleanup. Files that have been present in it have been moved elsewhere or deleted (if they were unused). If you loaded any of these files as part of your custom skin or on-wiki CSS/JS, you should make a copy of the old files in a non-MediaWiki directory. See the RELEASE-NOTES file for the full list of moved/deleted files.

Full support for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 has been removed. Users of these browsers will not have any JavaScript when using MediaWiki. JavaScript fixes specific to them have also been removed. Additional Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 fixes that exist in pages of your wiki like MediaWiki:Common.js and similar can be safely removed if you want to keep your site's browser support consistent.

This will require you to update LocalSettings.php after the upgrade – a prominently displayed warning message should guide you through the process, suggesting the exact configuration that you need to add.If you're upgrading via a tarball release, that is all you need to do.

If you're upgrading via git or otherwise from source, note that the skins themselves have been each moved to a separate repository and will need to be installed separately (much like extensions, some basic ones are included in the tarball).